D'HOBACH'S COTERIEl

Alan Charles Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton Legacy Library) Princeton: (Princeton U. Press, 1976) (From the Preface: "The subtitle of this work, 'An Enlightenment in Paris,' carries a double meaning. Indeed, the coterie holbachique, in its diversity, its admixture of the profound and the frivolous, its broad tolerance, and its various  individual searches for ways to understand and to improve the secular world, constituted an important element, and is some ways a microcosm, of French Enlightenment." Id. at ix. "Far from being the alienated figures or outcasts that some historians had depicted as the coterie holbachique, the devotees of d'Holbach's circle, it soon became evident, with few exceptions has risen into (and in a few cases had been born into) various elites within the privileged structures of the Ancient Regime. From these heights they had served their causes. Beginning in 1789, those vantages and the riles of the men who occupied them increasingly were under assault. For the coterie holbachique the Revolution meant an end to their lace in the process of enlightenment as they conceived it." Id. at x.).